5th MESEA Conference Announcement
5th
MESEA Conference
The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas
May 18–20, 2006
University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Call for Papers
Speakers:
Myriam Chancy,
Writer and independent
scholar
Shirley Geok-Lin Lim University of California, Santa
Barbara
Jeremy D. Popkin University of Kentucky
Joan-Pau Rubiés
London School of Economics and Political Science
ETHNIC LIFE WRITING AND HISTORIES
We invite paper abstracts and complete panel proposals on all
aspects of ethnic life writing and histories in the Americas,
Europe, Asia, and Africa.
We encourage interdisciplinary perspectives that highlight the
intersections between life writing, history, sociology, and culture.
Topics may include, but are not limited to: theoretical
intersections between auto/biography and history; expanding the
concepts of auto/biography and histories; theory as auto/biography;
auto/ethnography as auto/biography; autobiographies and biographies;
the cultural work of life writing texts; testimonio; genres
of life writing in ethnic contexts; travel and travel writing:
writing selves, writing histories; life writing as historical
inscription; family memoirs; narrative perspectives in history and
auto/biography; questions of ethics in life writing; autobiography,
history and law; concepts of nationhood and history through life
writing; voices in history, historical voices; alternative
histories; auto/biographies by/about historians; creating cultural
and/or collective memory through life writing; visualizing
auto/biographies and histories; the media and virtuality: film as
auto/biography and history; the Internet and blogs as forms of life
writing; theater studies and autoperformance; hearing and speaking:
aural and oral auto/biography and histories; the sociologies and
economics of auto/biography and histories; different worlds,
different auto/biographies, different histories – globalization and
its (dis)contents.
Three hard copies of 300-word abstracts or full panel proposals
(that include a description of the panel and specific abstracts) as
well as an electronic copy must be submitted to MESEA’s Program
Director, Yiorgos Kalogeras, Department of English, Aristotle
University, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece (kalogera@enl.auth.gr)
by November 15, 2005.
At this conference, MESEA is inaugurating its Young Scholars
Research Awards. For more information:
http://www.mesea.org
CFP for 5th MESEA Conference, The Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas, Pamplona, Spain: May 18–20, 2006 - Mediated Voices: Constructing, Challenging, and Eradicating Methods of Mediation in African American Women’s Narratives.
This panel explores the various dimensions of first-person, as-told-to narratives of African American women’s lives in slavery and freedom. From the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, non-literate and enslaved African American women related personal experiences to interviewers and amanuenses for a multitude of reasons. Constructions and authorship of these narratives have been debated and cause texts to be excluded from being classified as part of African American women’s literary tradition. Consequently, when scholars examine and attempt to situate these texts into specific literary traditions, the authority and positions of the writer and narrator are confusing and questionable. At the heart of these textual mediations are African American women who were complicit in, resisted or worked to eradicate the mediation to create “writings” that were uniquely self-representative.
Send one-page proposals by October 15 to: DoVeanna S. Fulton (doveanna.fulton@asu.edu) and Joycelyn K. Moody (moodyjk@earthlink.net). For more information on the MESEA conference go to: http://www.baas.ac.uk/news/confdets.asp?confnews=Europe&id=577
DoVeanna S. Fulton, Associate Professor, English Department, Arizona State University, P.O. Box 870302, Tempe, AZ 85287-0302, (480) 965-6356, (480) 965-3451 (fax)
List of Members’ Panel Suggestions for the 5th MESEA Conference
Pamplona, May 18-20, 2006
Please remember that you must write directly to the Panel Convenor with your paper proposals. The Convenor will then submit the completed panel to the Conference Program Director by 15 November.
1. Panel title: “Homeland Security and the Management of ‘Life’ and ‘Death’”
Co-convenors: Grace Hong (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Sanda Lwin (Yale University).
This panel takes up the conference theme, “Ethnic Life Writing and Histories” in order to raise the question of what is meant by and recognized as "life" in the contemporary moment. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the United States has utilized a discourse of injury to legitimate brutal and unilateral war against Afghanistan and Iraq, to justify the coerced participation and support for these attacks from European and Asian allied nations, and to rationalize racist immigration policy and racial profiling. While U.S. has claimed that these wars are necessary for self-protection and “homeland security,” such claims obscure the ways in which these wars are aggressive imperialist attempts to reconsolidate U.S. control in the face of its weakening global economic influence. Perhaps instigated by U.S efforts at global hegemony, and fueled by attacks in Madrid and London, European nations are themselves using such notions as “homeland security” to justify their own racist immigration practices and racial profiling tactics.
In this context, racialization is managed through the selective definition and protection of “life” and the differential extension of “death,” as legitimated through the notion of “homeland security.” Which violations of life are recognized as such, and which are narrated as merely ways of maintaining “security”? The torture and indefinite detention of prisoners without trial in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the dearth of images of soldiers killed in Iraq as well as images of Iraqi civilian casualties, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian man misrecognized as “Asian” and killed by British police immediately following the July 7 bombings are only a few examples of the ways in which certain lives are valued and certain deaths are mourned, while others are not.
Given this context in which racialization is produced through a differential relationship to death—physical, social, and political—racialized cultures become an archive in which we can read for alternative definitions of “life” and “death.” This panel thus also takes up a genealogy of anti-racist thought—particularly queer and feminist analyses—which has emerged to contest nationalist and hegemonic definitions of “life” and “death” Such alternative deployments are particularly crucial now as definitions of life and death are mobilized by the U.S. to legitimate war and to rationalize a new global political economic order.
Scholars engaged in any analyses related to this topic are invited to submit proposals for this panel. Please send 1-page proposals, postmarked or sent electronically (e-mail or fax) by October 15, 2005, to:
Grace Hong, Department of English, 7187 Helen C. White Hall, 600 N. Park Drive, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, Email: gkhong@wisc.edu, Fax: 608-263-3709 (Please put “ATTN: Grace Hong” prominently on the cover sheet)
2. Panel title: “Academic Autobiography and Intellectual History”
Convenor: Rosalia Baena (University of Navarra)
This panel invites papers which analyze academic and/or intellectual autobiographies by transcultural authors in contemporary writing. Academic autobiography may be defined as "a published text presented as a truthful account of the author's own life, written by someone who has spent a significant part of that life as a professional member of an academic discipline, and in which the role of that academic discipline in the author's life is evident either in the content or in the construction of the narrative, or both" (Jeremy D. Popkin).
I am interested in the analysis of the definition and function of autobiography among academics: what motivates the writing of these autobiographies; the narrative strategies used; how the authors’ scientific trajectory and their epistemological positions affect the way they organize their life writing exercises; the repercussions that events of the private sphere exposed to the public view have; reflect on whether autobiography is simply an intellectual artifact or if it is related to social positions and academic strategies, etc. Moreover, I would like to investigate the position of academic autobiography in the context of contemporary cultural and intellectual history, reading these ostensibly subjective and personal narratives as significant interventions in the development of twentieth-century political, social, literary, and historical theory. Authors that may be considered include Edward Said, Jill Ker Conway, Shirley Lim, Maya Angelou, Eva Hoffman, Richard Rodriguez, Alice Kaplan, Maria Torgovnik, among others.
Please send 500-word abstracts to Rosalia Baena (rbaena@unav.es) before October 15th, 2006.
3. Panel title: “New Forms of Ethnic Life Writing—Blogging and the Internet”
Convenor: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (University of Heidelberg)
Color or Content: does race and ethnicity matter when you blog? Why are blogs such powerful tools in the discourse of ethnicity? Does the immediacy of blogging change the structure and process of ethnic identity formation? Tracing the evolution of blogger’s identity over time, is it shaped more by cultural preferences than skin color or ethnic heritage? Do blogs provide a way to investigate traditional genealogies or to create inventive new ones? Is specific ethnic culture becoming generally global culture or can we observe an increase in ethnification? Are blogs part of “post-ethnicity” – a growing willingness—and ability—to cross cultures in a post-national age? Do blogs enable more freedom or do they actually exert a controlling influence through the formation of extra-personal communities?
Clearly the personal and public, history and life writing, are finding new and creative expression in the day-to-day life of bloggers.
What would the deconstruction of statements like the one taken from a blog (Dec 12, 2003) tell us about ethnic identity? “You have no idea who I am, what my background is, etc. You are making all these assumptions based on the colour of my skin. The observations of someone who has spent the vast majority of his adult life in this part of the world [Asia] are perfectly valid as far as I am concerned and I am heartened that the majority of, for want of a better phrase, indigenous bloggers seem not to have a problem with that….” <http://www.flyingchair.net/story.php?storyID=876>.
What effect do blog headers have, for example, “Teen charged with Ethnic Intimidation on blog” <http://www.blogherald.com/2005/05/19/teen-charged-with-ethnic-intimidation-on-blog/>?
How do texts or images interface in blogging? How can we interpret life writing in the proliferating digital images enabled by blogging software such as the series of thousands of images of a company desperately trying to hold out in New Orleans on sites like: <http://sigmund.biz/kat/>?What long-range effect do political blogs like Xymphora <http://xymphora.blogspot.com/> have? This site, which has become part of the Library of Congress Web Preservation Project because of its blogging on 9/11, on Sept 5, 2005 introduced the concept of “ethnic cleansing” in reference to events surrounding Hurricane Katrina. This concept elicited numerous, personal, political, partly lengthy and very thought-provoking responses within the subsequent days.
If you are interested in investigating some of these questions, please submit an abstract to: Dorothea Fischer-Hornung: fischer-hornung@mesea.org. Deadline: October 15, 2005.
4. Panel title: “Traveling Nurses: Nancy Prince, Mary Seacole, Florence Nightingale and the Transatlantic Stories of their Lives”
Convenor: Carmen Birkle (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz)
Nursing was one of the few areas of life that were almost exclusively restricted to women in 19th-century America. However, it was by no means a reputable affair if done professionally. Before the Civil War, it was mostly a private occupation, usually practiced by women within the family or a closer circle of friends. But with the Civil War, the need for nurses increased, and many women – often from the upper social classes – volunteered. However, professional training was rare, and it was even less common if a woman was black. But if we consider nursing in a more general sense, women were nurses in the 19th century because of their general confinement to the private sphere, to the raising of children, and to the taking care of the sick in the family.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that Nancy Prince (1799-1856), an African American free woman from New England, had to take care of her mother and her numerous younger siblings. To escape from this dreary situation, she got married in 1824 and traveled with her husband to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he was a servant at court. To make her own money, as a form of nursing she took in children boarders and finally began to produce baby linen and children’s garments. Because of ill health, she left Russia before her husband (who died there) and returned to the U.S. only to embark on new enterprises. She found many poor black orphans and attempted to establish an asylum, which, however, miserably failed for lack of finances. Forever in search of “fields of usefulness,” she sailed to Jamaica in 1840. There she wanted to support emancipation and to teach children to read, write, work, and believe in God. Prince rejected the limitations of private nursing, rejected taking care of an incapable mother, who defined herself only through the number of children she gave birth to, and rejected having children of her own. Instead, she went into the field of public nursing, taking care of and educating children on a larger scale.
The African Jamaican Mary Seacole (1805-81), too, through her education as a nurse and her work with soldiers during the Crimean War, made public nursing her profession. The Italian-born English woman Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was one of the few (white) women in the 19th century who was actually trained in nursing and who later established nursing schools and published books about relevant topics. She became famous because of her engagement as a nursing administrator during the Crimean War (1854-56) and her improvement of hygienic conditions in military hospitals.
Instead of having children of their own, through public nursing and social work, Prince, Seacole, and Nightingale – to different extents – broke the boundaries between and integrated the gendered and racially marked private and public spheres in order to lead self-sufficient lives. Traveling in order to nurse implied that chances for public occupation were not myriad, but by writing about both their traveling and their nursing, the three women assumed authority over their lives that were marked in significantly distinct ways by racial and gender obstacles because of their different cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds. In my paper, I will analyze Prince’s and Seacole’s travel narratives, focusing on the idea of the need for transatlantic journeys in order to be professionally active, and some of Nightingale’s letters written during and about the Crimean War and will put particular emphasis on their narrative strategies of authorization as well as on the brief (transatlantic) encounter between Seacole and Nightingale during the Crimean War. Prince’s, Seacole’s, and Nightingale’s public nursing as well as the narrativization and publication of their experiences questioned gender roles and separate spheres and redefined the roles and positions of women in a transatlantic context.
Send abstracts by October 15, 2005 to Carmen Birkle (birkle@uni-mainz.de).
5. Panel title: “Thirty Years after Names: Native American Life Writing Revisited”
Convenor: Iping Liang (National Taiwan Normal University)
For over a century Native Americans have experienced one of the most complex and poignant relationships with the narrative form of autobiography in the history of non-mainstream literatures in North America. As far back as 1833 a pattern of co-authorship was established with the publication of Black Hawk by J. B. Patterson, to be followed in the next century by Cogewea (Mourning Dove and Lucullus McWhorter, 1927), Black Elk Speaks (Nicholas Black Elk and John Neihardt, 1932), and arguably Waterlily (Ella Deloria and Franz Boas, completed in 1944 and first published in 1990). The issues of co-authorship, collaboration and co-incorporation, in the words of Arnold Krupat, seem to define the nature of “Indian autobiography” “as a genre [based on] the principle of original bicultural composite composition” (1985: 31).
As Krupat notes, the concept of “Indian autobiography” is contradictory (1985: 30). Despite its oddity with oral traditions, “Indian autobiography” has flourished since N. Scott Momaday’s Names: A Memoir (1976). In the course of thirty years, the genre has been enriched by works such as The Way to Rainy Mountain (1977), Storyteller (1981), Halfbreed Chronicles (1986), Interior Landscapes (1990), Faces in the Moon (1994), Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians (1994), Mixedblood Messages (1998), Family Matters, Tribal Affairs (1998), I Hear the Train (2001), Winning the Dust Bowl (2001), Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir (2002), Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), etc. As various as the forms and voices of these texts are, Native American biographical narratives are, nevertheless, characterized by what Simon Ortiz says in his poem: “I Tell You Now.”
Thirty years after Names, MESEA 2006 would be a good occasion to revisit the genre of Native American life writing. This panel welcomes the widest possible theoretical criticisms and textual analyses. Possible topics to be considered include the issue of authorship and subjectivity; the individual and the collective; comparative studies; cultural translation; genre blurring; cross cultural collaboration; crossblood and crosswriting; life writing as Native ethnography; dispossession and life writing; the pictorial tradition of Native life stories; as well as the material context of the production of Native American biographical narratives. We also welcome proposals that concern other Native life writing (co)authors, such as Occom, Apess, Winnemucca, Wooden Leg, Yellow Wolf, Geronimo, Eastman, Bonnin and Luther Standing Bull.
Send abstracts by October 15, 2005 to Iping Liang (lip@ntnu.edu.tw).
6. Panel title: “The Logic of Fragmentation in Ethnic Life Writing”
Convenors: Ana Maria Manzanas (University of Salamanca) and Jesús Benito (University of Valladolid)
“One has been told by others that life is all about identity and coherence and continuity,” writes James Hans in Imitation and the Image of Man We are taught to seek unity as opposed to dispersion and fragmentation, yet our lives do not unfold in the manner of a Victorian novel; life is not coherent and continuous and does not follow a linear perspective, as traditional autobiographers would have it. “Progress,” redefined by Derek Walcott as “history’s dirty joke,” was the backbone of Franklin’s Autobiography, but can hardly account for the lives of the subaltern others. This panel welcomes papers looking at the ideological and aesthetic consequences of deconstructing unity, linearity and continuity in ethnic writing. If we do away with the logic of universalism, purism and monolingualism, what other logic or logics remain? How does fragmentation absorb and displace hegemonic forms of knowledge into the perspective of the subaltern, as Walter Mignolo claims in Local Histories, Global Designs? The panel intends to address other questions such as when and how does heterogeneity become a positive rather than a negative dispersion of energy? How can multiplicity and fragmentation become a more accurate way of looking at the self?
Send abstracts by October 15, 2005 to Ana Manzanas (amanzana@usal.es).
7. Panel title: “Assuming Ethnic Identity in Autobiographical Novels”
Convenor: Cathy Waegner (University of Siegen)
The young, white, upper middle-class author Gayle Brandeis has written a powerful first novel called The Book of Dead Birds (2003): She describes the painful path of the daughter of a Korean prostitute and an African American soldier, growing up in a racialized district in San Diego. The author has conducted intensive research in order to authenticate the settings, events, and references to Korean culture in her bildungsroman. In numerous interviews, however, Brandeis insists on the autographical, deeply personal impulses of her book with its first-person narrator.
What are the problems involved when an author assumes an ethnic mask, in this case a composite yellow/black one? Mere “literary minstrelsy”? Arrogant presumption on the part of the mainstream author? Even unethical?? Does the charisma of the first-person narrator fade when the ethnicity of the author is known? Or is the author’s imaginative feat intensified for the reader? Which narrative strategies enhance the interface between autobiography and fiction? Do we in fact have to re-think notions of “the autobiographical”? How do texts like this affect general perceptions of racialization and the history of ethnic persons?
Ideally, contributors to this panel would, taken as a whole, present a range of ethnicities of both authors and masks.
Send abstracts by October 15, 2005 to Cathy Waegner (waegner@anglistik.uni-siegen.de).
Updated September 2005
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